In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death
2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 100; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jat294
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
ResumoIn reciting the Lord's Prayer, Catholics, Orthodox Church members, and Protestants all ask that God's will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” In this sustained and learned argument that Mormonism is an “all-encompassing plan of death conquest,” Samuel Morris Brown indicates why the Lord's Prayer is not part of Mormon communal or personal ritual (p. 287). Mormons do not want earth as it is in heaven but heaven as it is on earth. A physician working in intensive care, Brown is as familiar with death in the early nineteenth century as he is with it in the twenty-first century. He opens with a portrait of “holy death” that includes deathbed scenes from an account of the Mormon prophet and his family written by Joseph Smith's mother. Brown reminds readers that during his youth Smith dealt both with the possibility of his own demise as a result of osteomyelitis and the devastating death of his favorite brother, Alvin. What follows are chapters in which death touches the Mormon story at every point: the “gold plates” were “grave artifacts” (p. 7). Smith's fascination with the Egyptian Book of the Dead was connected to the “reformed Egyptian,” the so-called Book of Mormon language (p. 85). He “translated” the story of Abraham and Joseph in Egypt from an Egyptian papyrus; he connected Indian burial mounds to the Book of Mormon story; ordinary graves held ancestors' bones. Ordinances introduced in the Kirtland temple in Ohio and later in Nauvoo, Illinois, and elsewhere were the means by which eternal life for family units was assured.
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